PREDICTING THE PENETRATION AND NAVIGATING THE MOTION OF A LIQUID DROP IN A LAYERED POROUS MEDIUM: VISCOUS FINGERING VS. CAPILLARY FINGERING

Abstract In this paper, penetration of a liquid drop in a layered porous medium as well as its motion navigation was investigated using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). The porous medium was generated by locating square obstacles randomly in the each layer which would cause the layered porosity in the domain. Two regimes of penetration; (a) capillary fingering regime and (b) viscous fingering regime were used for this study. The relationship between the porosity and the penetration rate was studied. The effect of porous surface type (i.e., hydrophobicity or hydrophilicity) on the penetration rate and penetration pattern was also investigated. A new parameter, called “Percent of hydrophobicity”, was defined such that each layer of the porous medium could have multiple properties. This means that in each layer some solid elements might be randomly hydrophobic or hydrophilic. Using this hydrophobicity coefficient, one could navigate the motion of the liquid in such porous media.